Two days ago, we reported on Western Digital's unwelcome warranty cuts. In that article, we said: "It would be surprising if Seagate didn't follow WD's lead on warranties." Well, as sure as water flows downhill and not up, Seagate has now followed suit – and then some. They will now offer miserly one year warranties on most Barracuda and Momentus hard disk drives. Seagate wrote the following letter on 6th December to its authorised distributors explaining this:

Effective December 31, 2011, Seagate will be changing its warranty policy from a 5 year to a 3 year warranty period for Nearline drives, 5 years to 1 year for certain Desktop and Notebook Bare Drives, 5 years to 3 years on Barracuda XT and Momentus XT, and from as much as 5 years to 2 years on Consumer Electronics.

So that's just a fifth of the time on some drives – a shockingly massive drop! Doesn't sound like a company that cares about its customers much then, does it? The new warranty periods will apply from shipments dated 31st December and the details of the new warranty periods are as follows:

Constellation 2 and ES.2 drives: 3 years

Barracuda and Barracuda Green 3.5-inch drives: 1 year

Barracuda XT: 3 years

Momentus 2.5-inch (5400 and 7200rpm): 1 year

Momentus XT: 3 years

SV35 Series - Video Surveillance: 2 years

Pipeline HD Mini, Pipeline HD: 2 years

Well, at least mission-critical and retail products are not affected by this change. Yet. Seagate also said that it's standardizing warranties

to be more consistent with those commonly applied throughout the consumer electronics and technology industries. By aligning to current industry standards Seagate can continue to focus its investments on technology innovation and unique product features that drive value for our customers rather than holding long-term reserves for warranty returns.

Now isn't that reassuring? Translated, it appears to say that they want to save their pennies to spend more on research and development of shiny new products, rather than actually support their customers, who keep them in business in the first place. It seems likely that the missing time can be purchased as a "warranty upgrade", much like WD have done. We will update you as details come in.

One does wonder though, if this negative trend is also a sign that mechanical hard disk drives are slowly becoming obsolete and that their overall reliability is dropping? Currently, they only seem to have a few advantages over Flash-based SSD's, such as capacity, low cost and long term reliability as Flash has a finite lifetime of write cycles. These plus points are very significant, but as they are eroded, there will be less and less reason to buy mechanical hard disk drives, so it seems plausible that the two main storage companies would want to reduce warranties and risk a backlash.

Now, we just have to see what Hitachi will do, given that they are still very much in the game and have recently released 4 TB HDD's, ahead of the other two bigger players. What are the odds on them not reducing their warranties?Source: The Register

well with seagate now following WD with this news instead of thinking they are treating customers badly you have to wonder if the real motivation is because of the flooding in Thailand. They might be thinking that they aren't going to have the resources for a lot of replacement drives being sent out. i guess we will find out once the shortage is over. if not maybe it is time to start buying ssd's and screwing the hdd companies over for not having good business practices.

by: qubitI think these are enterprise quality drives giving better reliability aren't they? A good choice if you can afford it.

Yes, they are tested to run 24/7 and specifically aimed at vigilance/recording tasks, renowned for the write and head endurance (and price), I have a several years old RE2 1TB 7200 RPM that has been through a lot of cycles and still goes through max write and read speed.
They are also deadly silent (bear in mind my system is noisy) and bring the same warranty as Velociraptors (5 years I think).
It's needless to say that if you use them in home environment they'll last even more, if luck permits :)

Seagate and WD are both getting less and less reliable. They both play on quantity not quality which is really disappointing. Once ultrabooks arrive (most likely with Intel SSD) S and WD would get really pissed.

by: DroneSeagate and WD are both getting less and less reliable. They both play on quantity not quality which is really disappointing. Once ultrabooks arrive (most likely with Intel SSD) S and WD would get really pissed.

My fear is that they will shrink the NAND lithography even more to cut costs and that means much less write endurance, look at what happened from 34 to 25 nm

by: radrokMy fear is that they will shrink the NAND lithography even more to cut costs and that means much less write endurance, look at what happened from 34 to 25 nm

We need an altogether different and much better technology to replace flash. Did you know that it's been around since the 80's? Yeah, it's that old! It's had all the same problems since then. Besides the limited write life on flash, writing to it is a pain the ass and so slooow. This is because while sectors can be read singly, to write one you can only do so by erasing a block of sectors first. So that's a double whammy: the erase cycle and the multiblocks. Hard discs? You just write over the sector you want. One pass and the damned thing doesn't wear out.

Perhaps IBM's Racetrack tech that we reported on a while back will be the solution?

by: DroneIt won't surprise me. "Shrink" will reduce overall power usage so they could brag about long battery life and so on. I said it before they should play on quality.

I didn't mean to shade your post, was just thinking along with it, sorry if it seemed so ;)

by: qubitWe need an altogether different and much better technology to replace flash. Did you know that it's been around since the 80's? Yeah, it's that old! It's had all the same problems since then. Besides the limited write life on flash, writing to it is a pain the ass and so slooow. This is because while sectors can be read singly, to write one you can only do so by erasing a block of sectors first. So that's a double whammy: the erase cycle and the multiblocks. Hard discs? You just write over the sector you want. One pass and the damned thing doesn't wear out.

Perhaps IBM's Racetrack tech that we reported on a while back will be the solution?

by: RejZoRSo, they have nearly zero trust in their products. Instead of increasing the warranty, they are decreasing it. Heh...

by: HossHugeI don't think that's it. They are just trying to save money.

That's like a contradiction in itself.

Of course that's why they would reduce the warranty. Why else? To many of their products fail shortly after 1yr and they know it. It's costing them a mint. Now they can keep building the same garbage and not be accountable for it. Money in hand. A large company knows EXACTLY what's going on. They have statistical data pouring in and know to the penny what it's costing them.